Research Interests:

Pediatric dosing of pharmaceutical agents is rarely studied during any phase of clinical
trials of new drugs for ethical and moral reasons. Many drug companies also fear the
liability issues they may be vulnerable to during a pediatric drug study. Nevertheless,
the pediatric population makes up about 23% of the total population in the United
States and up to 45% of the population of developing countries, and this vulnerable
population has critical unmet needs related to the pharmacokinetics of pharmaceutical
drugs and their related metabolites. To overcome these shortcomings the US federal
government has created Pediatric Research Consortia through the NIH to promote the
study of pediatric health, especially as it relates to the absorption, distribution,
metabolism, and excretion of drugs in this population. The Pediatric Pharmacology
laboratory at the University of Toledo is a member of several of these NIH consortia
and is actively involved in studies related to pediatric dosing and pharmacology.
As an analytical organic chemist, my goal is to promote and support these basic medical
studies through the utilization of high end analytical instrumentation such as High
Performance Liquid Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry. I have over 30 years of experience
operating and maintaining various automated chromatographic systems as well as more
than 20 years of hands-on experience at operating and generating data from different
types of mass spectrometers. These analytical instruments provide the necessary resolution,
sensitivity and specificity for the identification and quantitation of the drugs of
interest and their metabolites, as well as of disease pertinent bio-markers. Several
ongoing studies in the lab include the pharmacokinetics of antibiotic drugs in pediatric
patients including bedaquiline,rifabutin and solithromycin.

I also maintain an interest in how gut microbiota can influence disease states and
to research how gut microbiota can affect pediatric dosing and diseases as well as
how the human gut microbiome changes with age. My other interests relate to cardiovascular
disease and diagnosis as well as the involvement of gut flora in the development of
human disease states. I maintain active projects and collaborations within the Center
for Hypertension and Personalized Medicine which focus on characterization of novel
metabolites and therapeutic drug targets for cardiovascular disease using high-throughput
tandem MS approaches.